Painting with Watercolors for Beginners

This blog post should cover what you need to know to get started with watercolor painting. However, if you’re still left scratching your head upon reading, please feel free to ask questions in the comments! It’s my pleasure to help you get comfortable using this wonderful, versatile medium!

Before I started writing this post, I decided to conduct some online research on painting with watercolors for beginners. That way, I reasoned, I wouldn’t gloss over any points, and I could craft an altogether better post. And … holy moly. I use watercolors all the time, and the information I found on Google overwhelmed me. After three too many mind-boggling articles, I threw up my hands and decided that I’m showing you how I, personally, “do” watercolors — and the adjective for my watercolor approach is “simple”.

Supplies

First, I want to create a supply list for you. Of course, your most obvious supply will be a set of watercolors.

The set I have and prefer is from Greenleaf & Blueberry. It’s an artist-grade set, which means that it’s a little pricey {but oh-so-wonderful}! That said, if you’re just beginning, you really don’t have to invest in an artist-grade set. In her guest blog post on watercolor paints, which is worth a read, Jessica Moeller {of Greenleaf & Blueberry} recommends Sakura Koi or Winsor & Newton Cotman as wonderful student-grade sets. I’d go for the Sakura Koi since it includes more colors.

Whatever set you decide on, the first thing you should do upon receiving your watercolors is create a color chart. Try Google Image Searching “watercolor color chart” for ideas!

Next, it’s time to think about brushes.

Brushes will vary by artist; since I’m writing about my personal watercolor painting style, I’ll go over the brushes I keep in my artillery. I like tiny details, which means I like tiny brushes. My “staple” brushes are:

*For some reason, I can’t find links for these brushes; but I purchased all of the brushes listed above at the local Michael’s store. You don’t have to buy the exact brushes I’ve listed; just a couple small-ish brushes should suffice!

Paper is also important.

I generally use Strathmore 300 Series 140 lb. cold press watercolor paper because that’s what is available locally. In case you’re wondering why watercolor requires special paper, it’s because of absorbency. Watercolor paper essentially lets the paint sit on top of the paper until it dries rather than spiderwebbing out. If you try to paint on, say, printer paper, the watercolor will bleed at the edges because that paper is super absorbent. You can also buy hot press paper, which has a smoother texture than cold press paper.

Finally, you’ll need clean water and a cloth {I use an old dinner napkin} or paper towel for blotting your brush.

Any vessel will work for the water; I use an old mug.

Paint Opacity

The great thing about painting with watercolors is you are in complete control of opacity. Watch how one color can change depending on the ratio of water to paint on the brush!

The brush stroke on the left shows what lots of water and not much paint looks like. The middle shows a more equal ratio of water and paint. The right brush stoke shows more paint than water.

You may be thinking, “That’s all well and good, but how do I control the water/paint ratio?” Before you do anything, apply a drop or two of water directly to the color or colors you are planning on using. This will moisten them and effectively make them easier to work with. Then, you can do one of two things:

1. Use a Palette

You can pull out a palette and mix three different shades of the same color. For the first color, use your brush to apply around eight drops of water into a well. Then, dip your still-wet brush into your moistened watercolor, and transfer some color into the water you put in the well.

For the second shade, apply approximately five drops of water in the well. Again, dip your still-wet brush into your moistened watercolor, and transfer color into the water. Be sure and stir the brush so all the paint comes off into the water! If this new color looks a lot like your first one, add more paint.

For the darkest shade, you’ll just work directly from the paint palette, which should offer a very rich concentration of paint.

2. Work Directly Off the Watercolor Set

You can use the concentration of water on your brush to control the shade of paint. If you want a very light shade, saturate your brush in water and touch the brush’s tip to the paint. If you put the brush to paper and the concentration of paint is unexpectedly high, dip your paintbrush in the water again, and apply that water directly to the paint on the paper. It will thin out! For medium tones, you’ll still apply paint on a wet brush, but you’ll apply more paint. For dark tones, I blot water off my brush {it will still be wet, but not saturated}, then I use the moistened paint straight off the palette.

Blending

The reason behind learning about paint opacity is blending. Having different tones of the same color of paint in a piece grants you the ability to make something look real. I’m going to show you how to turn a circle into a sphere with blending and different paint opacities:

1. Begin by painting a circle of your lightest shade.

2. We’re going to pretend that there’s a light to the upper right of the sphere, as pictured. Effectively, a shadow will appear on the lower left of the circle. To start making that shadow, load your brush with your medium shade. Paint that shade so it “hugs” the circle in a half-moon shape, like this:

3. You can see that there’s a definite division between the medium shade and the light shade now. To get rid of that difference, you’ll want to blend the paint together — which is a simple task when painting with watercolors! To blend, submerge your brush bristles in water in order to get any remaining paint off the brush. Dry off the brush to make sure all the paint is gone, then wet the bristles of the brush again with water. Then, put your brush at the division between the light and medium watercolors, and coax the medium shade out by rehydrating it and pulling the color out. Soon, you won’t be able to tell where the medium shade ends and where the light shade begins!

4. Now it’s time to add the dark shade to the bottom of your circle/sphere. Hug the dark shade around the bottom as pictured.

5. Tease out the dark shade just as you did the medium shade, and voilà!

6. You can add a shadow to the bottom of the sphere, if you’d like. To do so, you’ll paint a little sliver of dark paint underneath the sphere, like so:

Then, draw out the color out with a wet brush until it fades into nothing.

It may be easier to understand the blending/shading concept if you can watch a video instead:

If you want more practice with blending and giving shapes dimension, I would recommend painting these shapes in different colors. You could make the sphere green, the cube blue, etc. Drawing shapes like this is how I came to understand how to make subjects look 3D; and painting them is the art equivalent of learning how to conjugate when learning a language. It may be, eh, a little boring … but oh-so-helpful.

Mixing Watercolors

To mix watercolors, you’ll most definitely want a palette, whether it’s built in to your watercolor set or freestanding. The process behind mixing colors is straightforward: put one color in the palette, then add another color. Mix them together, and you’ll get a new color!

If you have a small selection of colors to choose from, a knowledge of mixing is very helpful. You can reference this color wheel/cheat sheet to see which colors to mix together to achieve your desired result.

If you mix yellow watercolor with red watercolor, you will get an orange value. Other popular color combinations include blue + yellow (green) and red + blue (purple).

If your mixed color dries out in your palette, don’t worry. You can re-hydrate it and it will be good as new, regardless of the amount of time that has passed.

Using Watercolors and Brushes for Calligraphy

I love using watercolors to create calligraphy. You may know from the watercolor calligraphy tutorial that you can actually write with watercolors and a calligraphy pen; but sometimes it’s fun to ditch the pen altogether and just paint an address on.

You can learn how to achieve gorgeous lettering with a paintbrush in this tutorial!

To achieve this whimsical, artistic effect, you’ll treat your watercolor brush like as you would a brush pen or a dip pen. For this all-lowercase Janet Style envelope, I followed all the letter formations and upstrokes/downstrokes as shown in the Janet Style worksheet set. However, I used watercolor and a brush instead of a calligraphy pen! I love the effect of paint fading in and out as well as the stroke variation.

I used Beth Style calligraphy to create the names on these vibrant place cards.

You can, of course, combine the watercolor concept and the calligraphy concept to make a number of other things, from art prints to invitations to place cards and beyond! The sky’s the limit as far as this dynamic duo is concerned.

Remaining Questions

This blog post covers the very basics of working with watercolor, and I’m sure you’re left with a couple of questions. From reading the comments on the Herbal Watercolor Tutorial, I have gleaned that a good topic to touch on in the future would be how to know exactly where to paint shadows, medium tones, and light tones when working from real life or a photo. To explore that concept further, check out Painting with Watercolors for Beginners Part II.

In the meantime, I hope that the information presented here proves useful to you! Thanks again for reading TPK.

125 Comments

I’ve always wanted to watercolor and was really struggling to find the right things online to get started. This post is really simple and beautifully put together and helps tons! Thank you so much !!!!!!!

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HI Lindsey,
Thanks for this tutorial, it’s very helpful. I still need a little help… I never know if I should add another layer of a darker shade while the previous one is still wet or if I should wait for it to dry.
Thanks again

New to the watercolor thing. I actually use the “Finetic” colors and I’m about to ask you a really dumb question. When I am done using them, they still have water in them. Do I dump the water out or just leave it there to dry until Next time? Thanks

Water in the paints themselves? I’d leave it to dry if it’s not contaminated with another color–that way none of your paint will go down the drain with the water.

If it’s just on the palette, you can wipe it off or let it dry; I usually let my “puddles” dry on my palette if it’s a mix I use often. (Be careful with that though…I recently got a new color and it stained a large section of a plastic palette.)

I was thrilled to come across your water colour tutorial , thank you for putting this online for those of us interested in learning how to use W.Cs. I have only skimmed through it for now and what I have seen looks very helpful. You have many categories of learning to choose from. On reading through the list I see you have a listing for Sketchbook which I am also very interested in. Once again thank you for putting so much effort into these. I will leave a comment about the tutorial later on.
Sincerely Isabel

Hello!
thanks a lot for your articles.
It’s so clear … It’s the first time that I can understand so easily the way to improve with watercolor.
(and my misunderstanding of other blogs, tuto … was not because of the language but well because they weren’t so clearly explained)